A paradigm shift preparing for “Meaningful Use”
With the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, more than $20 billion has been allocated to fund and modernize Healthcare IT. Much of these funds are being used to advance the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR), moving away from outdated paper records. The overall goal is to modernize the healthcare system and provide better patient care. This advancement comes with financial incentives for those demonstrating certified EHR adoption stages by 2015, a regulation termed “Meaningful Use”. Conversely, organizations not adopting Meaningful Use stages will be subject to financial penalties and reductions in Medicare reimbursements.
“Meaningful Use” also brings new IT infrastructure challenges, which some are referring to as a “Data Tsunami”. This tsunami of medical data includes PACS data, imaging, lab/test results, patient history, genome sequencing and video consultation that will turn patient medical records into a thick, dense file (required to be stored/archived 24/7 and retained for years). As a result, HealthCare organizations will experience exponential data growth (and accompanying capacity) that will be costly to finance and difficult to maintain. In addition, to meet HIPAA compliance and disaster recovery objectives, medical data must also be backed-up in a secure data center location and made highly accessible to a wide network of web enabled users.
StrataCore and our partner base stand ready to assist healthcare organizations by offering holistic solutions to meet these new challenges. Our aim is to help these organizations better respond to the “Data Tsunami” through deployment of Private and Hybrid Cloud based solutions. With StrataCore’s help, these organizations will also be able to enhance their disaster recovery objectives, promote cost savings, and demonstrate significant progress toward compliance with Meaningful Use regulations.
SF
3/14/12
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